For beginners, State of Decay 2 can be a little bit overwhelming at first. Therefore, in this part of our guide, we show you how to put your settlement on track by drawing up a list of the tasks to be carried out in priority.

The game is divided into three areas, relatively similar maps. If you follow the tutorial, you can choose between the city in the hills, the city of the plateau or the city in the valley. By skipping the tutorial, the map will be chosen randomly. In any case, your first base is exactly the same. You will have the opportunity to visit the three maps during your game.

Find a Location

Your first task is to find an inspection point by opening your map. They are represented by a pair of binoculars. Climb to the top then use RT to bring up many question marks. By fixing them for a short time, you add a marker on your map and get information on the site. A bar fills at the top of the screen until you have examined all the observable sites.

Tip: You can use the LB key to climb up or down a ladder faster. When climbing, it consumes endurance, but not downhill.

On the way to the locations of your first base indicated by a house-shaped logo, your goal is to get your hands on raw materials. You can find a bag directly in the trunk of your vehicle. Otherwise, look for a garage that often contains raw materials or fuel. For the moment, you cannot change character. You will have to settle for only one bag of resources.

Establish a Foundation

Take the direction of your first base. Visit every room in the house and eliminate all zombies present.

Once the zone is secured, interact with the white flag on the floor to claim a base and then drop your bag of raw materials into the reserve.

First Structure

Now that you have a base and enough raw materials to build your first structure, a choice is available to you. If you played the tutorial, one of your characters is infected with the red plague. Your priority is to stabilize your condition by building an infirmary. If you skipped the tutorial, none of your survivors are still sick, so you can start with a workshop or an infirmary of your choice. If you played the tutorial, wait until the construction of the infirmary has completed to place your infected character in quarantine.

Attention: when you claim your first base, a room and a part of the garden are unusable and ask to be redeveloped. The master bedroom is your priority since it brings a morale boost. Be careful not to run multiple builds at the same time. Indeed, a noise penalty is added for each activity in your database. Check the threat level on the base tab to see the sources of the threat.

Find a Vehicle

Now that your base is claimed and your first structures are being built, you have to go out to find resources. As a priority, you need to get your hands on food and medicine as they have the greatest negative impact on your group's morale. However, it is always best to get your hands on a vehicle in working order. Whether you started with the tutorial or without, you arrived on the map with a vehicle containing two bags of resources. It is therefore strongly recommended to find gasoline to recover this vehicle. Go talk to one of your survivors to ask him to accompany you. Then open your map and enjoy your recognition early in the game to find a garage. Search it to find a fuel can. If you come across a resource bag (fuel) hold the X key to force it open. You will get a can of fuel and 1 or 2 Molotov cocktails.

Attention: never force the opening of the bags of resources, since they exist in limited number in the world of the game. But in the case of this bag of fuel, it is more important to get quickly enough to recover a vehicle.

Once in possession of a fuel can, return to the starting vehicle and go to the rear left side to see the Refueling command. Hold the Y button to refuel your vehicle and return to park in one of the designated areas in front of your base. Then interact with the safe then press RT to transfer the bags to the base. You will get Transhipment success for transferring a backpack from a vehicle.

Help Your Neighbors

After establishing your first base, you will be contacted by a neighboring enclave. If you followed the tutorial, your neighbor should ask you for help to clean up an infestation, then a plague nest in order to save your tainted character. If you skipped the tutorial, your first quest will be to collect three plague samples to get the recipe for a plague vaccine. In both cases, these quests are very important for the beginning of the adventure since they allow you to gain a significant amount of influence.

Be careful: don’t use your influence to trade with your neighbors, save it for your first outposts!

Finding Food and Medicine

Now that you have a vehicle in working order, you will be able to organize your first expedition to recover resources. Focus your efforts on food and ammo. Take the vehicle to the first city. Indeed, it is strongly recommended not to search the houses around your base during the day. Enjoy the hours of sunshine to explore a little further, and search adjacent houses overnight to reduce risk. Find a new inspection point and make a search to search only those buildings that contain the resources you are looking for. In our case, it is better to search restaurants and clinics for food and medicine. With each bag of resources, put them in the trunk of your vehicle. Search the buildings in the area until you have six bags in the trunk of your car, and one on the back of your two survivors.

Tip: talk with a survivor who accompanies you to switch on him and can fill his backpack also.

Improve / Upgrade Your Base

In order not to waste resources, your first structure upgrade should be about storage. Indeed, against 6 commodities you will increase storage by 10 for all resources and will be able to store enough food at once to have a few days of respite. You can then build a garden in the last available location to get food and medicine. A watchtower facility is not really recommended for the first base since the threat is not very important at the beginning of the game and you will leave this first house fairly quickly.

Claiming Outposts

By bringing in resources and helping your neighbors, you should have gained enough influence to claim a first outpost (300 influences). The outposts are very important in State of Decay 2 since they allow access to the cabinet supply without returning to the base and changing character. But more importantly, they allow to establish a security perimeter around the outpost. That is, the area around the outpost can not accommodate infestation. It is therefore very important to choose outposts that can cover several buildings with their security perimeter in order to secure a maximum of terrain and avoid the spread of zombies.

Finally, their primary function is to provide you with a permanent advantage that depends on the site. They can provide you with medicine, food, gas, or even extra beds for your survivors. To start your adventure, we advise you to claim a "collection of medicos " outpost. You will get 1 medicine a day. Your second outpost should provide food to offset the daily consumption of these two resources.

Tip: Improve your command center as soon as you can to increase the number of outposts possible - four being the maximum.

First Night

After a good day of car resource recovery, your survivors must be tired. Switch to the survivor (s) you did not use during the day, and try to equip them with your larger backpacks. Their mission is to explore the houses around your base. The night must be used to recover the many small items that directly occupy your inventory. Of course, you can get some bags of resources, but using a night car can be too much of a threat, especially around your base. It is therefore strongly recommended to walk around and search slowly to avoid being surprised.